The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, r. Mar. 2026

p. 65 So we did what we had to do [in Hungary, pre-WWII]. We had fun. We played. We got drunk and danced from one war to the next. What else were we supposed to do? We all knew that the wonderful world that had been built for us was coming to an end. So our games were urgent. Necessary. We simply had to have fun. There was nothing else for us. Because we knew what was coming. I don't know how, we just did. All of us. Men and women. Rich and poor. Jews and goyim. All knew. So we behaved like children and did what children do best. Pretend that there was nothing wrong and continue to play. The world would have to take care of itself.

p. 198 You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man).

p. 221 "Gods are a biological necessity," he said to me on a particularly warm night at his home in Georgetown, during that last summer when he could still get around on crutches, "as integral to our species as language or opposable thumbs." According to [John von Neumann], faith had afforded the primeval peoples of the world a source of strength, power, and meaning that modern man lacked completely; and it was this lack, this profound loss, that now had to be addressed by science. "We have no guiding star," he told me, "nothing to look up or aspire to, so we are devolving, falling back into animality, losing the very thing that has let us advance so far beyond what was originally intended for us."

p. 271 "Our earthly existence, since it in itself has a very doubtful meaning, can only be a means towards a goal of another existence. The idea that everything in the world has a meaning is, after all, precisely analogous to the principle that everything has a cause, on which the whole of science rests." – Kurt Gödel, letter to his mother

p. 350 "After that, I [Lee Sedol] continued playing but I had already decided to retire. With the debut of AI, I've realized that I cannot be at the top, even if I make a spectacular comeback and return to being the number one player through frantic efforts. Even if I become the best that the world has ever known, there is an entity that cannot be defeated."

The Nix by Nathan Hill, r. Mar. 2026

p. 98 It always went like this. The kids who were victims of the Nix always felt, at first, fear. Then luck. Then possession. Then pride. Then terror. ... "The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst."

p. 153 Example: At recess, he left. He simply marched away. He walked toward the most distant swing set and then walked on. He just didn’t stop. It had never occurred to him before that he could not stop. Everyone stopped. But in the face of his mother’s goneness, all the world’s normal rules fell away. If she could leave, why couldn’t he? So he did. He walked away and was surprised how easy it was. He walked along the sidewalk, didn’t even attempt to run or hide. He walked in plain view and nobody stopped him. Nobody said a word. He floated away. It was a whole new reality. Maybe, he thought, his mother also found it this easy. To go. What kept people where they were, in their normal orbits? Nothing, he realized for the first time. There was nothing to stop anyone from, on any given day, vanishing.

p. 274 Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.

p. 344 The human body is so fragile. It’s ruined by the smallest things. You can put twenty bullets into a camel and it will just keep coming for you, but half an inch of shrapnel is enough to kill us plain little people. Our bodies are the thin knife’s edge separating us from oblivion.

p. 469 Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

p. 500 All of this so reflexive and automatic and habituated and slow that the travelers were a little zoned out and playing with their phones and just simply enduring this uniquely modern, first world ordeal that is not per se “difficult” but is definitely exhausting. Spiritually debilitating. Everyone feeling a small ache of regret, suspecting that, as a people, we could do better. But we don’t. The line for a McRib was quiet and solemn and twenty people deep.

p. 506 “Sometimes the country thinks it deserves a spanking, sometimes it wants a hug,” Periwinkle said. “When it wants a hug, it votes Democrat. I’m hedging on it’s a spanking moment right now.”

p. 543 The shutter clicks. Ginsberg stands and smiles sadly. He moves on, swallowed by the vast crowd, the incandescent day.

p. 560 The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate.

p. 563 She wants to prove that she’s gone through the terror of the day and now she’s stronger and better, even though she doesn’t know if she really is. How can one tell when one becomes a stronger and better person? Through action, she decides.

p. 564 In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.

p. 618 Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

p. 619 But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all—just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.

The Missing Ink by Philip Hensher, r. Mar. 2026

p. 49 It's perfectly possible to enjoy unattainable aspiration while practising a basic version of the art form.

p. 153 The wonderful transformation of writing with a reliable ink reservoir, or transportable bottles of ink, would have been accompanied by a jettisoning of the writing companions of decades – sometimes without the faintest regret, sometimes with a tinge of sadness that things had changed. We gaze at these things, now so useless, and try to garner the faintest sense of the human investment which once went into them.

p. 201 [Proust] is from one of the first generations of thinkers to stress that handwriting is utterly individual, saying that 'everyone, however humble, is a master of those familiar little household creatures whose life lies as it were suspended on the paper, that is, the unique characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses.'

p. 255 Some part of the writer's spirit had passed into the handwriting, and had stayed there. Her humanity and her hand overlapped, and something remained, indelibly, in these physical traces.